IRAN NEWS |

How Iran Regime Called the Shots on the Nuclear Deal

NCRI - President Donald Trump is adamant that the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated by former President Obama is revised. This is making supporters of the deal worried and the media is picking up the false fears and reporting untruths in the press. It is now a consensus among many that the nuclear deal is preserved otherwise a crisis will unfold.

However, the crisis is already happening. The Iranian regime is not abiding by the nuclear deal in many respects. And anyway, there are sunset clauses on it that mean key terms will soon expire. The inspection of nuclear facility clauses are ridiculous because they give the regime advance notice before an inspection takes place. And Iran has recently refused nuclear inspectors access to military facilities.

Moreover, Iran’s missile arsenal is growing rapidly. Most worrying is that not much attention has been paid to the fact that the nuclear deal allows the Iranian regime to design and construct advanced centrifuges. This means that Iran is not going against the deal by modernising its nuclear infrastructure.

Iran, as it has done in the past, will covertly enrich uranium at one of its undisclosed facilities. Obviously, it will not do it at one of its declared facilities. To enrich, it needs to develop advanced centrifuges and it has any number of places to hide them from inspectors.

Iran was the driving force behind the nuclear deal negotiations. Well, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the head of the Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi were. Salehi has more knowledge about the nuclear program he is in charge of than anyone else.

A member of Iran’s negotiating team said back in 2015 that Salehi believed that Iran shouldn’t have produced and installed so many IR-1s as they were to be replaced, showing that Iran has no problem with disassembling its old ones. This however looked to the West like Iran was circumscribing its nuclear activities when it actually wasn’t.

It would be wise to listen to what the Iranian regime says about the nuclear deal. It regularly boasts about what it achieved during the negotiations and, unlike their Western counterparts, they talk about the details of the deal. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani regularly talks about the right to develop advance centrifuge models. In December last year, he boasted that the country now has IR-8 centrifuges – “the most modern and advanced ones Iran has obtained”.

All this became possible because the Obama administration allowed it. During Obama’s first term, the administration insisted Iran was only allowed a small nuclear program. However, during the second term, Obama was looking for something that could qualify as his legacy. And the nuclear deal was it. So during the second term of the administration, many of its own red lines were crossed and Iran was allowed to industrialise its program. Sunset clauses were drawn into the deal and Iran came out pretty well.

The Iranian regime has proven itself to be unreliable and untrustworthy and it is now up to the Trump administration to address the issues that were ignored by Obama’s administration. It should be very clear by now that the deal is very one-sided.